THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE AN INTERVIEW WITH GORDON R. BEEM FOR THE VETERAN’S ORAL HISTORY PROJECT CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WAR AND SOCIETY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY MARCH 28, 2000 KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE INTERVIEW BY KURT PIEHLER AND DAVE GORMAN TRANSCRIPT BY DAVE GORMAN AND DARRYL AUSTIN EDITED BY TIFFANY R. DAVIS KURT PIEHLER: This begins an interview with Gordon R. Beem on March 28, 2000 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee with Kurt Piehler … DAVE GORMAN: … and Dave Gorman. PIEHLER: And before beginning the formal questioning, I just wanted to thank, on the record, Mr. Beem, … retired major of the United States Air Force, for his many generous contributions of books and videos to the library and archives at the Center for the Study of War and Society in honor of his hero, General Thyng. And in beginning this oral history … interview, we want to go way back and … ask you a little bit about your parents, beginning with your father. And in fact, there has been a military connection in your family—your father was a retired sergeant of the First World War. Could you talk a little bit about your father? GORDON R. BEEM: My father was born in the year 1896 in Summit Station, Ohio, which is just to the east of Columbus. He came from a farm family. His father, Edward Beem, died when my dad was fourteen, and at that point my father became the male head of the family. He had two younger brothers, William and Edward, and of course my Grandmother Beem. His uncles talked to him and told him that they would help keep the family farm together, and it was on that basis that my father continued to go to high school [and] was able to graduate. After he graduated from high school—again, the family still intact on the family farm—he went to a summer school, got himself a teacher’s certificate, and began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse out in the area of Summit Station, Ohio. I have pictures of my dad … outside that school, and there are some barefoot kids, as one would expect at that particular time. When the war—when World War I began, there was [a] question about whether or not my father was going to join the army, which he did do in 1917, and became a member of the 130 th Ohio Engineers. Before he went to war, his grandfather, my great-grandfather, who was known in the area as “Honest Ed” Beem, called him in and talked to him about going off to war. And he told my father something that my dad later relayed to me when I went off to war, and I know he did the same with my older brother before he went off to war during World War II. And that is, Great- Grandpa Beem called my dad in and said to him roughly the equivalent of the following. He said, “Ed, there are two things that a man has to do in his life. The first thing that man has to do is keep his credit good.” He said, “If you borrow money from a man, and you borrow five dollars from a man and you get five dollars back, you go pay that five dollars, because you may soon after, or sometime after, want to borrow ten, so you got to keep your credit good.” He said, “The second thing a man’s got to do in life is maintain his self-respect. You’ve got to be able to look into a mirror, day-after-day, and say, ‘With the talents that God gave me, I’ve done the best I can, and that I have lived up to the expectations of my family.’” With that, my father went off to war. Eventually he ended up in France, with the Ohio Engineers. He was a first sergeant. And I have pictures of Dad, one of which sits in our living room at home, pictured right after the Armistice, taken in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, and it keeps my father with me, although he’s been dead since 1971. My mother is also from Central Ohio; she was born in Columbus. Her name was Marie Ritter, and Ritter is my middle name. Mom was born in 1900, to my great—my grandparents. And I 1 knew my grandparents quite well, although my Beem grandparents, only my grandmother was alive, and I only barely remember her, since I was a small child the only time that I can remember seeing her. But my Ritter grandparents, the last time I saw them was when I went to Korea in 1951, and both of them were still alive at age ninety and ninety-one. My mother graduated from high school in Columbus, [and] worked for the Columbus Dispatch, in their classified advertising department, until she married my father, and that was at the end of the war. They met in 1920 and were married in 1922. I have an older brother who was born in 1924, in February, on February 10. I was born February 1, 1927, and my younger sister was born October 6, 1933, and her name is Janet. My brother is Edgar Allen Beem, Jr. My father, after World War I, worked in the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio. He was a bookkeeper and a timekeeper, and we lived in Niles, Ohio, where I was born. My brother was born in the nearby town of Warren. In 1925, two years before I was born, a man knocked on our apartment door and introduced himself as a sales representative of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. And what he wanted to do was sell a small industrial policy on the life of my brother. My mother was curious. She invited the gentleman in. He talked to her at some length, and in the course of the conversation, she asked him: how good a job was it selling life insurance? And he went on to explain how well he was doing as an insurance salesman. That evening, as my mother tells the story, and my father reluctantly agreed, the many times I’ve heard it, when he came home that evening, my mother told him about the salesman who had been there, and she then also said that she had made an appointment for the man who did the hiring for Metropolitan Life, the assistant manager who did the interviewing, to come and see her and my dad. My dad responded in the negative, but in the course of some family discussions, finally agreed to at least see the gentleman, … and so the man came. Apparently he liked what he saw. My father liked what he heard, but he asked my mother a very simple question: “How are we gonna survive, since they only pay fifty dollars a month for the first three months, and we’ve been living on 90 dollars a month?” My mother said, “I’ll go to the butcher and to the bakery and to the grocery store and to the landlord, and I’ll try to make arrangements for some credit, because if you … are as good a salesman as you think you can be, after three months you’ll begin to get your commissions, and you should do better than we were doing with you as a timekeeper.” Thus, my father joined Metropolitan Life in 1925, and he had a career with them that lasted until he retired in 1961. He moved from salesman—route salesman, knocking on doors—to become an assistant manager, where he worked with other salesmen. He then was among the first group of men chosen to be a field training representative, and it was at that point in 1933 that we moved … from Youngstown, Ohio to New Rochelle, New York. My father worked out of New York from 1933 to 1936, received two internal promotions in New York, and in 1936 was named manager of the Portland, Maine District of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. And I can remember where his office was. It was at 465 Congress Street, on the tenth floor of the Bank of Commerce building. The tenth floor had a beautiful corner office that was his, which had a view of Casco Bay, which is the famous bay in southern Maine. Dad was manager of that office until he retired, and essentially from 193[6] until 1950, that was my home. PIEHLER: I guess several questions come up. I mean, one very immediate one is—your father did very well in the 1930’s, I mean, in a depression. I mean, he got promoted and … 2 BEEM: All of my father’s promotions were during the Depression. I have to say that we were very, very fortunate. We were never hungry. And we were, I think, moved from his being a timekeeper, we—the family then was probably in the lower class. We moved into the middle class during my father’s years with Metropolitan Life. And it was a comfortable life, as I remember it. In 1940, he bought our first home, and it was the family homestead for forty-nine years until the death of my mother in 1986. So I do remember the Depression, and I also remember how fortunate we were, particularly, I think, when I look back on it and realize the—I remember seeing the WPA [Works Progress Administration], for example, put a sewer in at a street nearby where we lived, and I never realized how fortunate we were until I became a little more mature and began to study history.